PERFORMING ARTS

Peabody Trio

Anose-thumbing sense of humor ripples through much of Mauricio Kagel's music. But while his Piano Trio No. 2 in One Movement -- especially with its desolately beautiful finale, written in the wake of 9/11 -- is a far cry from his more puckishly absurdist pieces, there's unmistakable mischief in the little marching figures and creepy-crawly slitherings at the opening of the work. The Peabody Trio, in its program at the Corcoran Gallery on Sunday, conjured smiles in those early passages, kept pace with the music's restlessly changing moods and found a touching stillness in the elegiac finale.

No less ear-catching was composer Stephen Coxe's conjectural reconstruction of the (now lost) original piano trio version of Janácek's String Quartet No. 1, the "Kreutzer Sonata." Inspired by a Tolstoy novella about a love triangle that ends in jealous murder, the quartet's impassioned lyricism translates arrestingly to the roiling piano and operatic treatment of the violin and cello lines in Coxe's retooling.

The Peabody performed the Janácek with trenchancy and kept the emotional temperature high in Dvorák's rapturous, often Brahmsian F-Minor Trio, Op. 65. With throaty, robust tone from violinist Violaine Melançon and cellist Natasha Brofsky, and rock-solid keyboard work from pianist Seth Knopp (who rode the crests of Dvorák's writing in the bigger moments without ever overwhelming his partners), the ensemble brought an edge-of-the-seat excitement to this exuberantly romantic score.

-- Joe Banno

'Channeling Glenn Gould'

So you think you know Glenn Gould? Under the guise of a chamber music concert, the University of Maryland School of Music threw down the trivia gantlet in College Park on Sunday. Oh, sure, Gould was the eccentric Canadian pianist who recorded Bach's "Goldberg Variations." That's easy. But who was his favorite composer? (Orlando Gibbons.) Preferred leisure reading? (Japanese fiction.) Recommended travel destinations? (Cold Canadian barrens, ideal for recording radio documentaries.)

Sunday's concert, "Channeling Glenn Gould," addressed these factoids with a program that matched Gould's creative genius. Accompanied by carefully edited program notes, audio files and film clips, nine professional area musicians performed music that Gould found intriguing, or might have pursued, had he not died in 1982.

Pianist Larissa Dedova had the unwelcome honor of playing Bach's keyboard works; she proved more handy with Scarlatti, whose music Gould admired for its "scintillating sequences" and "high quirk quotient." Violinist James Stern and pianist Audrey Andrist channeled Shinto spirituality through Somei Satoh's ethereal 1980 sonata, "Birds in Warped Time II." Andrist, an excellent pianist who happens to hail from Saskatchewan, also backed Katherine Murdoch's adroit performance of Hindemith's colorful viola sonata. "When properly adduced," -- as this sonata was -- Hindemith's music "is the true amalgam of ecstasy and reason." Or so Gould said.

The concert opened Maryland's new "Music in Mind" series, thematic recitals that will benefit the university's music scholarship fund. If "Channeling Glenn Gould" is any indication, the patrons are in for a worthwhile learning experience.